Solidarity 121, 8 November 2007

"British jobs for British workers”. A UK Independence Party slogan? British National Party? National Front? Right now it comes from Labour prime minister Gordon Brown. At the TUC conference in September, Brown talked about “British workers”, “British jobs” and “British living standards” (don’t mention the 2% public sector pay limit...) with such unashamed nationalism that even a few union general secretaries felt compelled to rebuke him. Now he has upped the ante. At the end of last month, after the Government admitted that it had underestimated the number of migrant workers in Britain by...

“You can expect”, writes US economist Nouriel Roubini, “that the ongoing credit crunch will get much worse in the year ahead and its fallout will spread from the US to Europe and throughout Asia and the globe. "Trillions of dollars of securitised assets that were sliced and diced in the long food chain of securitisation are now at some risk. The first crisis of financial globalisation and securitisation is only at its beginning stage”. At one end — the starting end of this crisis — two million poorer US households are likely to lose their homes in the coming months because, with interest rates...

At the turn of the year Labour announced a significant change to school-testing arrangements for students aged 11 and 14. But will the scheme solve the problem of the old tests for students and teachers — stress and demotivation and lessons which are designed to “teach to the test”? In 2004 pressure from parents and teachers forced alterations to testing-arrangements for seven-year olds, granting primacy to teacher assessment and giving teachers greater say in the timing and content of the National Curriculum (NC) tests their young students would face. The current changes have been implemented...

On 29 October the Commons Science and technology committee published a review of the 1967 Abortion Act. They made three main recommendations: • Upholding the 24 week time limit for abortion; • Removing the need for women seeking an abortion to get two doctors' signatures; • Allowing nurses to perform first trimester abortions. Around the review there had been a drive by the anti-abortion lobby and a small handful of highly vocal MPs, mainly men, mostly Tories, to chip away at abortion rights. They will not be pleased with these recommendations. An end to the “two doctors’ signatures” clause...

Yayha al Faifi fled Saudi Arabia in 2002 after he was sacked from his job with British Aerospace for trying to organise a workers' meeting to discuss new contracts. He has continued the struggle for workers' rights in Saudi Arabia ever since. Sacha Ismail spoke to him at a Socialist Youth Network demonstration coinciding with the state visit of Saudi King Abdullah. Can you tell us about your campaigning? I have continued to campaign peacefully for workers' rights. What Saudi workers want is the right to negotiate - but the regime will not even grant this. They have no interest whatsoever in...

On 26 November, Britain’s two best-known neo-Nazis: Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party, and David Irving, the “historian” and convicted Holocaust denier, have been invited to speak at the “Oxford Union Society”. The Oxford Union, a debating society which was once the stamping ground of Tony Benn, Michael Foot and Paul Foot, but is now populated by upperclass adolescent morons whose idea of a high profile speaker is the model Jordan, has organised this as a “free speech debate”. Such a “debate” would be more of a fascist rally than an argument for genuine freedom of speech. Its...

A "relaunch to achieve workers’ representation” — that is what supporters of Solidarity will be arguing at the conference of the Labour Representation Committee on 17 November. The Bournemouth Labour Party conference decision to ban motions from unions and local Labour Parties at future conferences completed a full shut-down of the Labour Party’s living political link of accountability to the labour movement. It has forced every socialist who has taken the life of the Labour Party seriously — and every socialist should have done, because for over a hundred years the life of the Labour Party...